Dynamical Constraints on Disk Masses

Abstract

While the total interior mass of a galaxy is reasonably well determined by a good rotation curve, the relative contributions from disk, bulge and halo are only weakly constrained by one-dimensional data. Barred galaxies are intrinsically more complicated, but provide much tighter constraints on the disk masses and support the idea that most of the mass in the inner parts of bright galaxies is in their stars. There appears to be no systematic difference in dark matter content between barred and unbarred galaxies, consistent with the theoretical result that the global stability of galaxies with dense centers does not depend on their halo fraction. The rotation curve shapes of lower luminosity and low-surface-brightness galaxies, on the other hand, indicate significant mass in the DM halo even near their centers. We find that most DM halos appear to have large cores, inconsistent with the predictions from cosmological simulations. We also show that such large-core halos can result from compression by disk infall of physically reasonable initial halos. Maximum disks, while apparently required by the data, do seem to present some puzzles; most notably they re-open the old disk-halo ``conspiracy'' issue and incorrectly predict that surface brightness should be a second parameter in the Tully-Fisher relation.